Top 100 Ortega Y Gasset Quotes
#1. a quotation from the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as an epigraph for Stoner: "A hero is one who wants to be himself." In
John Williams
#2. I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#5. Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#7. Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#9. We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#10. Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#11. By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#13. Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#15. Life means to have something definite to do-a mission to fulfill-and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#16. Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#18. To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#20. The combinations of these two elements, enchantment and surrender, is, then, essential to the love which we are discussing ... What exists in love is surrender due to enchantment.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#21. In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#24. The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of man. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#26. For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#27. Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#28. Biography - a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#29. In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#30. Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#31. One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#32. We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#34. There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#35. The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#36. A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#39. We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, 'here and now,' without any postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#40. Every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they are constructions of possibilities; therefore they are pure bits of imagination, or fine ideas of our own ...
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#41. The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#42. The trend towards pure art betrays not arrogance, as is often thought, but modesty. Art that has rid itself of human pathos is a thing without consequence..
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#43. In order to be enchanted we must be, above all, capable of seeing another person - simply opening one's eyes will not do.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#45. The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#47. The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that, the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#48. From my point of view it is immoral for a being not to make the most intense effort every instant of his life.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#49. To learn English you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immbilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#51. The poet begins where the man ends.
The man's lot is to live his human life,
the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#52. The librarian's mission should be, not like up to now, a mere handling of the book as an object, but rather a know how (mise au point) of the book as a vital function.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#53. I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#54. In a way the philosopher and the barber are of the same guild; the barber cuts hair and the philosopher splits hairs.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#56. In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#59. A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#61. The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#62. That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#63. The individual point of view is the only point of view from which one is able to look at the world in its truth.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#64. The idea of beauty, like a slab of magnificent marble, has crushed all possible refinement and vitality from the psychology of love.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#65. Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#68. Man,then, rather than by what he he is,or by what he has,escapes the zooological scale by what he does,by his conduct.hence it is that he must always keep watch on himself.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#69. All we are given are possibilities to make ourselves one thing or another.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#70. Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being , and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#73. I have long since learned, as a measure of elementary hygiene, to be on guard when anyone quotes Pascal.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#74. He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#75. There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#77. With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#79. The well being of democracies regardless of their type and status is dependent on one small technical detail: The right to vote. Everything else is secondary.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#80. Under the species of Syndicalism and Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#82. Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#85. Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#87. As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilization, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#88. If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man's inner destiny sets it.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#89. The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#90. Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#91. Tragedy in the theater opens our eyes so that we can discover and appreciate the heroic in reality.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#92. When you are fed up with the troublesome present, take your gun, whistle for your dog, and go out to the mountain.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#93. just because of its promise of unlimited possibilities technology is an empty form like the most formalistic logic and is unable to determine the content of life.that is why our time,being the most intensely technical,is also the emptiest in all human history.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#94. Man's real treasure is the treasure of his mistakes, piled up stone by stone through thousands of years
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#95. Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#96. The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#97. The few individuals who are capable of spontaneous and joyous effort stand out. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training.
Ortega Y Gasset, Jose
#98. Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#99. The hero's will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#100. The abstract is no more than an instrument, an organ, to see the concrete clearly.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
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